𝐃𝐢𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐋𝐨𝐯𝐞: A Hannigram Love Story

Chapter One

Withering cherry blossom petals sluggishly cascaded onto the growing glades of deadening grass, the fallen flowers giving the illusion that the ground was covered in a snow with an odd array of colors such as pastel pink and light browns. Light grey puffs of clouds covered any evidence of sunlight, hardly any people walking out and about. The oncoming of fall swirled through the air the way snow did in the winter, but winter was slowly but surely coming, and soon the state would be covered in actual snow, and not just a trick of the eye.

Will Graham found that, as he thoughtfully gazed out along the park he decided to visit, he admired the constant cycle of seasons, how the flowers and earth would grow and then die upon cue in the town of Quantico, Virginia. It was of course the cycle of all life; everyone and every thing would wilt and die eventually, continuing a cycle that never ceased rotating.

His predominantly blue eyes flickered across the small patch of scenery, losing himself within the nature he had before him, each dying leaf and speck of dirt so intricately placed by Mother Nature. Will could see small animals within the dying trees every so often, squirrels and birds passing along hurriedly on the quivering branches upon which they shuffled on, food or twigs in their beaks or cheeks.

For the entirety of Will's stay within the hospital after the...incident, he felt discomforted and troubled, if not traumatized in a way. His gift to empathize with dark souls, to recreate their state of killer mind, had always been an issue for those around him, who couldn't actually place what state of mind Will actually had. To make matters worse, he was able to understand exactly why Hannibal had dug that blade into his abdomen so precariously.

"He never planned on killing you," a doctor had explained to Will one day after a string of inquiries from the wounded patient. "The gash was surgical; Hannibal knew what he was doing whilst he was doing it."

Will didn't know if this were good or bad news, though he wanted oh so desperately to believe it to be good. He knew the way Hannibal's mind worked, the pair of them were both rather similar in a multitude of ways, their brains containing the same gears that never stopped turning. Both were intelligent, one the learner and the other the benefactor.

That night, when Will had called Hannibal to warn him, to tell him to run because Jack Crawford, head of Behavior Sciences at the F.B.I., had placed the pieces together, Hannibal stayed. Things had gone awry by the looks of the scattered household items and bought art in the home, blood splattered along the walls and floor as if it were a piece by Jackson Pollock. Will and Crawford has almost died that night, but Alana Bloom, a psychology professor and profiler consultant for the F.B.I., had called the police, it had seemed. Just when Will had almost succumbed completely to the darkness, right when he truly believed himself to be yet another victim of the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lector. But that had never been the former surgeon's design; no, he wanted Will alive.

Will had refused to see Jack or Alana, wanting nothing to do with either of the two people Hannibal had almost killed. For a long time, Jack had pressed Will to continue to profile murderers, to tell the F.B.I. exactly what happened and why it happened, what the killer was thinking as they sliced up their victims and left them to rot. There was only one murderer who he found to be an ethereal artiste with their killings, beauty among the madness of blood and distorted yet elegantly placed body parts, and that was Hannibal Lector. The man was poetic in all he did, the murders not all in complete vain. Each of them were done for a specific reason, and, in Hannibal's mind, it was inevitable.

Standing from the park bench he was sitting on, Will stuffed his hands into the pockets of his Chesterfield trench coat, the fabric warming his chilled hands as he walked along a stoned path that would lead to his car. November had swept in Virginia all too soon, the time coming and going, days bleeding into nighttime. Will rarely slept; too many nightmares had ensured that. If and when Will did sleep for a decent amount of time, he'd wake up gasping for air, crying out into nothingness in the dead of night, spluttering as if he were choking on the very air he was supposed to breathe. Swirls of horrific images would puncture his mind like a forthcoming migraine, pounding like a hammer pounding a nail. Memories intertwined distastefully with his fears, torturing him mentally over and over and over again. It was as if they were wedged into the folds of his brain, and refused to remove themselves.